A comment from Bob Fox (via Twitter, @bfox11b) reminded me that I had meant to throw together a quick blog entry describing a problem and my solution to Internet Explorer crashing on me all the time.

A few months ago, I got a new laptop (Dell Vostro 1720).  This is my first 64 bit machine and I was running 64 bit IE8.  Over time, it started to crash unpredictably, but frequently (probably every day).  It’s pretty agile at recovering from all that, but it was a real nuisance. 

The problem seems to have been an adobe plugin, “Air” or their flash plugin – I don’t really know what it’s called or care all that much.  It turns out that it’s not compatible with a 64 bit environment (which is *totally* reasonable; it’s not like 64 bit is the kind of thing that anyone except ***crazy*** companies want to support or anything).  I tried to uninstall it but that experiment only lasted about 15 minutes.  It turns out that a ridiculous number of sites are using flash tech (I may be the last one to realize this on the planet).  So, I can’t live without it and I can’t use IE8 64 bit. 

My answer is to switch to 32bit IE8.  It’s been smooth sailing since then.

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